Have you ever visited the picturesque Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk? If not, you will soon be able to virtually visit it in your mobile phone. Under support of the UNDP Regional Anti Corruption Project (managed by UNDP Bratislava Regional Centre), we are developing the applications for the smartphones and tablets with the information about Ivano-Frankivsk municipality, its executive authorities and the public services they provide. If you happen to be unsatisfied with the quality of service or see that things go wrong with transparency and accountability of the service provision, you'll also have a tool to report about it to the responsible officials of the municipality and state authorities.
Nowadays, the number of cell phone users has been dramatically increasing in the world. Various applications for mobile phones allow opening civic dialogue to new participants with a powerful mix of offline outreach and online engagement. This tool is being increasingly used for development and good governance purposes worldwide. E.g., the “Textizen” (USA) is a platform for text-message surveys which empowers communities to reach residents where they are. The “Health Choices” (UK) provides users with access to much of the information on the existing National Health Service (NHS) Choices website through the convenience of their smartphone. The El Pulso de la Ciudad (The Pulse of the City) (Spain) allows citizens to become actively involved in the development of the city through the real time reporting of events. Citizens in Sydney (Australia) are turning to GPS app-enabled technology to assist police, local councils and businesses in the fight against graffiti. Motorists in Manchester (UK) will soon be able to find vacant parking spaces in the city centre using their mobile phones.
In Ukraine, usage of the mobile phones as another way of citizen engagement is just emerging. And we are among the first ones! Our project in Ivano-Frankivsk aims at promoting innovation for improving the quality of the service provision and combating corruption. More details about it can be found here.
The project started a few weeks ago, and by now we have already got and idea how the app will look like, what functions will the menu provide to the users, and - most importantly - what would be the opportunities to reach your ultimate goal if you want to report about the corruption case with public authorities. Even though we truly hope it will be highly unlikely that you suffer from corruption in Ivano-Frankivsk (according to the recent polls, only 11% of population in 2012 confirmed that they gave bribes to the public officials in Ukraine), in case of your bad luck you will have a tiny helper in your smartphone looking like this:
We expect that the project will enable easy acces of citizens and visitors of Ivano-Frankivsk municipality to the information about the city, its authorities and institutions as well as the public services it provides, and making the municipality with its structural divisions and communal institutions more transparent and open to citizens and visitors, says Sergiy Rudenko, department head, Ivano-Frankivsk municipality, municipal project coordinator.
